London has been battered by 50mph winds that have felled trees and caused travel chaos. Powerful gusts swept across the capital as the Met Office issued a yellow "be aware" weather alert for most of the country.

Winter always grants us the most unpredictable weather — except when it comes to turning our hair into a sodden pile of tangled rat-tails. Then, it’s all too familiar. So how to tackle it? As we all know, hats are the hair’s common enemy. Umbrellas crumple at the slightest gust of wind. And the wet-look hair trend is just soooo Prada AW13.

So thank goodness the beauty gods are listening. Their answer? If you can’t beat them, join them — with a plait ready to stand up to all weathers.

On the catwalks this season, the winter-proof plait found several backers. Alberta Ferretti — via Redken’s creative consultant Guido Palau — gave us a soft, romantic braid, with just the right amount of grit, “like one might imagine a peasant girl wearing during the Renaissance”.Meanwhile, backstage at Giles’s London Fashion Week show things got even wilder with the introduction of the “Braveheart braid”, as championed by Toni & Guy’s creative director Sacha Mascolo-Tarbuck — which translates as a simple dishevelled rope-plait which looks like it has seen its fair share of action.

With either, it pays to be just as liberal with your product as you are with your approach. Guido favours a boatload of Redken’s Wax Blast High Impact Finishing Spray (£13.95, redken.co.uk) to add undone texture. Mascolo-Tarbuck suggests an ample helping of label.m Resurrection Style Dust (£10.95,labelm.com) at the roots for volume, before smoothing the fringe area backwards with your hand using label.m Miracle Fibre (£13.25) to get the desired amount of wind-swept movement before you’ve even stepped out of your front door.

But while deliberate bad hair days are perhaps not for everyone, Laurent Philippon argues that plaits are in fact your new ally. “The braid is timeless — it’s not a style, it’s a spirit,” enthuses the editorial stylist for Bumble & Bumble and all-round hair guru, who created the look above — appealingly dubbed the Snooze Button Braid — by shaking the new volumiser-cum-dry-shampoo Prêt-à-Powder (£21.50, bumbleandbumble.co.uk) through the hair, “to give it slouch and stop it from being too perfect”, before loosely braiding it and teasing out the few requisite, nonchalant wisps.